The other path

At 2pm 10 years ago i said yes to what I discovered less than an hour later was certain disaster. I fell in profoundly in love with a teenager based upon a look, a joke and a discussion about poetry and the moon. Then she said she had homework to complete and my heart sank... I already knew this was impossible.

If I put down my hopes and dreams for one goddamn minute there is no mystery to any of this. The world is fractured and there is no pure path through it. In her new world there were two things sex and friendship. Frustrated by my lack of physical exertion within only a matter of months I was designated best friend forever... and that was it... forever!

In my world there were 3 designations. Sex - that which prostitutes are smart enough to get paid for, friendship that which ignored sex, and love which was supposed to be a physical-spiritual communion joining both body and mind. Love however means commitment, the end of freedom, a bondage and ultimately children, marriage and family. She knew this, she avoided this until the year before she died.

My project is a myth. The great mistake was to join my spiritual path to my sexual path. I believed until yesterday that both could be completed together. Through physical intimacy a communication and sharing between souls might be possible that would evaporate the self - that two might really become one... a death of the individual and a birth of something new. That orgasm was a tool to trigger release from self-attachment etc etc.

You and me
When we touch:
Where?

My hopes seemed almost to materialise except for one thing... she did not understand. There was only sex and friendship.

That said except for whatever happened between us, she remained loyal to her lover for 2 years, saying that when she was with him she didn't want to be anywhere else. Pretty good at her age! I've never experienced that, except with her. So there was more than sex for her, but it was not love... she always said she didn't believe in love. Quite what that chimera was - may be something substatial or maybe just momentary indulgences - remains a mystery to me.

But for me combining a spiritual and sexual path was a disaster. I lost one and so I lost the other. The spiritual path is not contingent. You do not need to complete something, or have some conditions arise before you can embark upon it, it is always possible and available. That is the beauty of spiritual realisation: it is not conditional, and, thus is flawless and indestructable. Sexual experience on the other hand is fraught with conditions: ones own state of mind, that of the other, physical health, opportunity, morality and good luck. She has died now: if that does not demonstrate the imperfection of physical existence then nothing will.

She was psychic. That was another level of confusion. Being able to see and speak to ghosts is not a spiritual capability, it is psychic. It is quite a different sort of energy. It is a often a by product of spiritual practice, but something to ignore on the spiritual path.

Friday last I dreamt of her father. He told me to behave myself and treat his wife and remaining daughter with respect. The following night, the eve of first ever seeing "my muse", she appeared in a dream and basically told me with little sympathy to get my act together. Strange that I needed her to tell me to move on (rather than the usual telling ghosts to move on) but it has been good and has evaporated remaining sentimentality and attachment to my dreams.

Dreams can come true, but they can also not come true and then what of them? The simple reality is that I should have become physically intimate when I had the chance. Ignored the morality of it, ignored her boyfriends feelings (which I found out much later were trivial anyway), trusted her to take her own path on life and make her own choices, risked inviting her into a fools paradise, and not demanded love or deeper spiritual connections before embarking. What is the worst that could have happened? wasted my most profound desires on a trivial sexual fling? maybe that way I would have got to where i am now much quicker! The realisation that there is nothing profound in worldly communion of any type. It all leads to death. Accepting her friendship, while it seemed to noble thing, was a fools move. If I loved, then it should be love, if i desired then it should be sex, and while friendship was there and I miss her very much, the distractions of the other things were greater.

All that said there is nothing to worry about in Earth bound relationships and life. It is fantastic and often highly beautiful and there to be enjoyed. But that road if you follow it to its end leads no where. The ride stops and we need to get off - always in the hall of earthly things.

Instead i now return (hopefully reinvigorated) 10 years late to the spiritual path. Recent investigations have pushed closer to realising that "self-reference is impossible". For the self this means that the path of trying to discover what it itself is is fundamentally flawed. We can never know ourselves in essence. Instead we can only "be" ourselves.

and that links to dhyana - the essence of mind which is "focus" or more often translated as meditation... but really it is focus. Focus on something and other things go. Focus very deeply on something and that process continues until everything else goes but what you focus on. That way the mind is "concentrated" (pardon the pun) and comes to know itself truely. Mind - the nature of all things - is present in all things - and knowing mind liberates us from all things. That is the spiritual path. I must have been on the path in passed lives, indeed I must have met "my muse" in passed live, but hopefully the latter is now ended and my last words to her "see you in another life" fall upon deaf ears, and instead i continue the fruitful spiritual path into future lives.

At 2pm today I will say "no" and take the most important other path that was available on 5th December 2007.